God and Jetfire (3 page)

 

THREE

I
am pregnant.

Typing the words, it felt as if I was forging an impossible reality.

Don't tell Mom. I'm not sure what I'm going to do yet.

It made my heart beat fast. But it also felt like something I could easily change. Backspace backspace backspace backspace.

*   *   *

The words slipped away when I pressed send, and I forgot them. My sister was twelve hours ahead in China, where she taught at a university. She coughed black soot and had to boil her drinking water, and she'd learned to speak Chinese tones so musically I couldn't recognize her voice within them. Four years older, Julie was my closest friend, though she was also the one, throughout my childhood, who was always reminding me I wasn't meant to be here.

My dad did it, too. When they'd tell me how I fell into a swimming pool as an infant but didn't cough or cry when they rescued me, Mom would say I must have been a water baby, born to swim, but Dad would say,
I don't know why your mother got so upset that day: you were an accident anyway!
And many times, I heard the story about my brother toddling into the living room, where he discovered me for the first time, the only point of which was to illustrate how neither here nor there was my arrival.
There's a little baby in there!
he said, which everyone thought was adorable. And so, incidentally, I began.

No one had meant to bring me here, I'd just slipped in somehow. It got confirmed all the time: pedestrians cut me off diagonally on busy sidewalks. Subway doors snapped on my nose. People stepped in front of me in line to buy tickets or board the plane. My speech teacher said I had to speak twice as loud because I was narrow and easy to ignore. I was occupying space meant for other things, too precarious myself to supply someone else's foundation.

*   *   *

Jevn and I were going to meet in the morning. I was supposed to decide what I wanted to do. I put the cast-iron skillet on the stove and, invigorated by its familiar weight, the ancient sound of crackling oil, I silently perfected my argument: why I could not be pregnant. Maybe, if I explained everything, that woman could recalibrate the test.

I couldn't even picture a child. Pregnancy was just an end, the vertigo of all my fears made absolute certainties. Shouldn't it take some kind of definite pull, a sustained desire, to draw another soul into the world? Or excesses of love and life and wisdom so overflowing it takes another whole person to contain it all? It should at least require collaborative skill, but I could barely design a building; how could we have inadvertently concocted a
child
?

But if I really was pregnant, then maybe it meant something. I'd taken smaller things as signs. Once when Jevn drove me to the doctor for a sore throat, the prescription was mistakenly written out to me with his last name. It had seemed like an artifact from the future, evidence from beyond that we were meant to be. I put that orange pill bottle in a drawer where I stored things I meant to keep forever, like my cat's tooth, and my own tooth, and a turquoise cross given to me by my grandmother. And the pieces of those ugly vases.

But, no. I was an accident. And being born and giving birth stitch a person into a history, puncture the fabric of the universe, anchor heels and hands firmly in the earth. They make a person part of a lineage, and lines, as I learned in trigonometry, have direction and intent. They don't float like points, without mass or orientation; they split the sky, they distinguish here from there, they begin to tell a story. I couldn't be pregnant because that would mean I had to be here, a stitch in the seam, connecting everyone.

*   *   *

In the morning my sister wrote she would come back from China and help me raise the baby; we could live on our family's sheep farm. She said, of the options, abortion may be simple, but there was the day after that, and the day after that.
Maybe if Jevn pays child support and you don't work for a year? You know you were an accident, right?

And then Jevn was knocking at my door, before I was ready to hear what he'd decided or tell him what I'd decided, or talk about any of this like it was real. I opened the door, and he stood there surprisingly fresh and energetic. He slipped in nervously, as if he had something to say. He was smiling and avoiding my eyes. His shallow breath made me hope he'd thought of something new. He said he'd gotten up early and taken a shower. He said he'd found himself—smiling. And then he began to float foreign images in front of my mind: keep the child, read it books, take it hiking, wait at the bus stop. He said he thought we should do it: be a family. Me, him, and the third.

I don't know what happened then.

I said no. Listened to myself say it. He said he watched himself hear it. I said it definitively and without qualification. I said
never
. And though I'd broken up with him countless other times, it was only then that I could see I finally lost him. His bright eyes became gray hollows. He paced my apartment, too large for it, and made me cower.

*   *   *

Then a darkness like no nightmare overtook us. The enemy was unknown and invisible, and so we lashed out blindly at each other. Old wounds reopened. I pushed him away. I wanted him out. I wanted to rid myself of the trust and affection that had imprisoned me for so long. I struggled to regain my footing. I couldn't think clearly with him in front of me, demanding certainty, but I was terrified to be left alone. I pounded my fear into the flesh of his chest, the meat of his shoulders, but as hard as my fists fell, the darkness only deepened.

Whenever things were difficult before, usually with school, he would remind me to breathe. Or he would say,
Remember the river.
Not any river in particular. He had his rivers, the ones that barreled through mountains in Colorado, and I had mine, that wound through the valleys of East Tennessee. We were both aliens in the flatlands of Ohio. He would tell me to lift my feet and let the water carry me. Don't waste energy struggling, just go where it takes me.

It was an easy image for him, because his natural instincts were like a deep-coursed stream. When he let go, he went far and made beautiful things. He encouraged me, always wanting to know what I was drawing, or thinking about, or building. He said that I had the most important thing to start with: sensitivity. But I didn't have a river. A palm reader showed me the fine, intricate, and undifferentiated webbing of my hands, the absence of a single strong line. Mine was a spring that ran across an unarticulated landscape, spreading and dividing when it encountered the smallest obstruction. She said it meant there wasn't a single direction for me; I could do anything, but I would never be sure about it.

Not knowing where I was going was a frightening but familiar feeling, full of potential. But it was a violent event for Jevn's river to change course. And yet, he'd done it; in one night, he'd devoted himself to a new direction. We would have a child. But now I was sending him coursing into the unknown, and I could no longer see into him. I saw only fear—the blank blindness of a panicked animal.

Pacing around my apartment, he charged forth powerfully in a new direction. If we weren't going to keep the baby together, he wanted to get rid of it. He didn't want me to raise the child as a single mother, because then he'd become a father as absent as his own. I insisted there had to be another way, and I wasn't ready to decide anything. Reduced to our reflexes, Jevn closed and concealed himself; I opened.

We fought wildly, for days. Not getting anywhere. All we knew was something big was going to happen. We were bound together and flying off a cliff, fighting only over how to land. He slammed his hand on the phone every time I reached for it to call my mother, though I still didn't think I could tell her. He thought we should figure things out for ourselves. He held the knob of the bathroom door so I couldn't come out until I made a decision. In between and in shock, we went to class, and I would spend the time forgetting that there was a decision to be made.

It was hard to believe I'd returned from my first trip to Europe just three months earlier. I was supposed to be asserting my independence, but I was so often calculating time zones, searching for pay phones and moments when Jevn and I could talk. I'd spent the summer in school in Copenhagen and then traveled all over by train. I'd brought very few things home with me, but one was a children's book I found in Venice. The title was
Oh!
and there were no words within it. As the pages unfolded, a coffee cup printed across the leaves stretched into a cruise ship; a pipe became the tail of a cat brushing its teeth. None of the objects were what you thought at first. And I guessed you were supposed to say “oh!” every time you realized that. When I found it, I was sunburned and hungry and lonely, but I was also happy, and I thought: this is the story of wrong trains and kind strangers and surprise vistas where you weren't supposed to be. There isn't some big right way for things to happen; things just unfold weightlessly, and we're left standing before the surprising story of our lives, little of it as we planned, every inch of it precious, with nothing much to say but “oh!” I was going to save that book for someday after all my travels were through, when I was too old to jog Mediterranean cliffsides and sleep in train stations, when I would get married and have children, at which point I would give it to them, and I would tell them all about life's charming twists and turns.

Memories like that would return to me sometimes when we were fighting, like a flash of light on the waves giving sudden orientation, and I'd feel sure that things were somehow going to be okay.

“Why does everything have to be
sugarcoated
for you?” Jevn demanded. This was not a wrong turn in Paris. He insisted that I make a decision, and so I did. I made a decision and then a phone call—but I waited for him to leave to do it.

*   *   *

He picked me up the next morning, and we drove less than a mile to the other side of the university. We pulled into a gravel parking lot behind a Mexican restaurant I had been to once and a stately segment of row houses. A small brick building sat in the far corner of the lot, and signs pointed to the surgery entrance at the basement level in back. We parked beside the Dumpsters and entered a tiny vestibule. An armed security guard scanned us with a handheld metal detector, and we edged around the door into reception, where two girls sat low behind a counter.
The Price Is Right
on the television in the waiting room; a man seated, inexplicably laughing. One of the girls filed my credit card in a long drawer that looked like it was drawn from a library's card catalog. In its place she handed me a device that, she explained, would vibrate when the doctor was ready for me.

I asked whether there wasn't something between now and surgery, some kind of counseling or preparation? She said that the clinic offered counseling over the phone and that I had already had it. They were young and in the middle of a conversation.

The windows in the waiting room looked out to the bumpers of cars parked at the level above us. Cars pulled in and out, flashing light fast around the perimeter of the room, and we could see feet clicking toward the upper entrance of the women's center. We took seats against the wall; the weight of the earth pressed against it on the other side. Bob Barker stood, microphone in hand, as a contestant pulled down hard on the big wheel, and the little device in my lap started to shake. I told Jevn that I didn't know what we should do, but I thought I'd probably never smile again. The sun was low and the seats of the Saab were warm on our very fast car ride home, during which I understood what he meant when he said he couldn't be responsible for that.

*   *   *

For the next few days, we clung to what we knew with certainty: we had to finish the school term. But I was exhausted and anxious, and so I asked Jevn to build my model. We were broken up but bound. I gave him my drawings, and he sat at the little table beside my drafting board in my apartment and began to lay out measurements on a piece of chipboard.

I picked up the pencil I had left there days ago. I traced the lines, trying to find the feeling that had originally shaped them, a threshold to that time when their contours were my biggest concern. Now it appeared they'd been drawn by someone else.

“Is this roofline supposed to meet this one?” he asked, but I didn't know. I hadn't decided. I designed with my eyes closed, like a mole digging where the ground was softest, asking myself if the space should open out left, open right. Should there be light, should there be shelter. Jevn thought about the quickest, simplest way to build things. The best material, the most efficient construction sequence. He cut similar pieces at the same time, using a jig for speed and precision. He would lay out all the parts before he assembled them. What resulted was always beautiful.

He worked furiously at the table. I hated how he glanced at me as I handed him my long metal ruler. Sitting there, he required me to make my many unmade decisions, and in very little time the questions that had consumed me during the school term were given certain, unremarkable dimension, and the thing I'd allowed to remain a rich mystery for ten weeks began to look like a building. I ran into the bathroom to throw up. He continued to measure and cut, measure, cut, and he finished my model in half the time it would have taken me.

I stepped into my shower and let the water pummel me. The north light of the frosted windows glowed; their rusted, wet cranks made muddy dust on the yellow tiles of the sill. I pressed my stomach with the palm of my hand. Nothing was visible there, but a small certainty began to develop inside me. A pebble dropped into my infinite lightness. A tiny weight that pulls a flying curtain flat. Two unstoppable inches and a hardening of my abdomen. When I moved, my muscles gently tightened around it, the weight of certainty, the early seed of a lifelong grief.